Lions of Kandahar (20 page)

Operate smarter, not harder. That’s why you were selected, remember?
I said to myself.

Bill called me over the radio. He didn’t like this area.

“Sir, there is no way to establish a security perimeter at this location. We are going to recon a spot on the high ground and maybe set up there,” he said.

With the desert at our back and the entire river valley laid out in front of us, the ledge Bill found turned out to be perfect. I scanned the riverbank and the honeycomb of mud compounds and villages sprawled before me. I didn’t see any trucks. No farmers tending to the fields, which were thick, green, and ready for harvest. Something didn’t add up. This valley should be alive with activity.

Suddenly, Victor, my normally cocky terp, ran up to me, frantic.

“
Turan
Rusty, you must hear this,” Victor said, nearly out of breath. “The Talibs are watching us, many, many of them.”

I tried to get him to calm down and explain what he had heard.
Usually the term “many” in Afghan math meant twenty to thirty, more or less. Afghan math was simple: Take the number they give you and cut it in half twice, and then it is only about 10 percent of that. Afghan numbers are always exaggerated.

I listened as one commander after another checked in. I counted fourteen total, and all sounded confident and calm. Some even laughed or had music playing in the background. Chills ran down my spine. How could so many fighters get this close to Kandahar city undetected? I tried to write down their code names but couldn’t keep up. We would find out later that the village directly in front of us was the Taliban’s headquarters in the southern part of the district.

“The Talibs say they beat Americans in Pashmul. Taliban commanders now say they do it again,” Victor said.

The Taliban commanders were talking about Shef’s team, and his warning to not come here without a battalion of troops echoed in my mind. When we left Kandahar Airfield, our intelligence shop estimated that three to four hundred fighters were in the valley. There were sixteen Taliban commanders in the notebook we found. If each enemy commander had fifty or more fighters, the intelligence was wrong. Way wrong. Good ole American math told me there were more than eight hundred enemy fighters before me, and that did not include those on the north side of the river. The north side of the river was twice as big and most likely held twice as many fighters. That put the total at more than two thousand.

The number rattled me. I immediately thought of the fights at Anaconda and Tora Bora. The difference between those and ours was that those battles were fought in the mountains. This was smack dab in the middle of a city. I focused on our advantages. Returning over and over to the same regions in Afghanistan gave Special Forces a very distinct advantage. We knew the people, the local leadership, the terrain, the enemy. I knew I had hunted at least four of the men I was hearing on the radio, who had been named in the captured
notebook. And, maybe more importantly, they knew us. Their rapid retreat from the compound earlier proved that. Hopefully we’d live up to our reputation.

Jared was shocked when I told him what I’d heard.

“Are you sure?” he said.

“As sure as three combat rotations in the same place can make me.”

“Okay, I got it. ISAF will never believe this, but I’m going to send this up now,” Jared said.

“Make sure our TOC gets the information out to the ISAF ground commanders.”

Now we were accomplishing one of the most important pieces of our mission—intelligence gathering. And what we were collecting was not secondhand or hearsay from an informant. It was real-world, real-time information on the enemy. Intelligence rarely gets more accurate.

After sending up the report, Jared passed word along the ridge that we likely faced an attack. The Taliban knew they couldn’t fight in the heat of the day. Instead they would wait until evening when it got cool.

We broke out our sniper rifles, made sure all of the machine guns and grenade launchers had full ammo loads, and dug in. As the last rays of sunshine faded, painting the whole sky orange, I split open a thick green pouch of spaghetti and started to eat. A few spoonfuls in, Victor was back, even more agitated than before.

“Captain Rusty, the Talibs are going to attack! They were speaking with each other, talking in strange languages, then stopped talking. Everyone stopped talking.”

“What do you mean they are talking in strange languages and stopped talking?”

“They were saying prayers, like, Be glad to be martyr for Allah,
Allah akbar, allah Akbar!
This is very bad.”

“Yes, partner, it sure is,” I said, heading toward Bill.

Typically, the prayers come out when it’s time to fight or celebrate. In the videos of suicide bombers, that is what you are hearing them say or scream:
Allah akbar
. God is great.

As twilight turned to a thick blanket of darkness, the radios stayed silent. There was nothing we could do but wait. Scanning the valley with my binoculars, I just wanted them to come. Combat was hard, but nothing fried my nerves like waiting. It was far easier to just fight the enemy instead of the battles in my head. You couldn’t prepare for everything, but you try, and it grates on your mind.

Casey, Jared’s turret gunner, first saw vehicles moving. It started with a group of four pickup trucks speeding north along the main road. Several seconds later, another convoy started moving, then another and another. We stopped counting at fifty-seven vehicles, all rolling at the same time. Some may have been decoys because they would stop, shut off their lights, and then proceed again. They were moving important people around the battlefield and positioning their forces.

Jared called for an AC-130 gunship for support but was told one wouldn’t be available for at least an hour. The only thing they could send immediately was a 1980s-era B-1 bomber built to fight the Soviet war machine. Its dart-like shape and long wings now patrolled over Afghanistan and Iraq delivering precision-guided bombs. From the ground, it looked like a fighter. I missed the massive hulking frame of the B-52. Bombers are great for hitting bigger targets like buildings, but at twenty thousand feet it was hard to hit moving pickup trucks.

The B-1 bomber arrived shortly and circled high overhead for several minutes as the Air Force controllers tried to talk it onto a target. By the time the B-1 identified a column of trucks, it was short of fuel, as it peeled off to top off from fuel tankers flying a racetrack pattern nearby. We had thirty minutes remaining before the AC-130 gunship would arrive.

Reports started coming in that Taliban fighters had moved into
the riverbed on our left and right flanks. Bill and Jeff started setting up ANA soldiers in a defensive position, using lasers to identify sectors of fire under night-vision goggles. As the Taliban moved, we countered. Like the early rounds of a boxing match, neither fighter got within reach of the other.

I stayed focused by keeping up with the Taliban movements on the map and trying to anticipate the next one. But with no air cover and an enemy setting up for what looked like a complex attack, much like the one that had hit Shef, I started to get nervous. As soon as I heard the buzz of the AC-130’s turboprops, I exhaled.

The stout Spectre gunship flew over us, bristling with guns. We couldn’t see its 105-mm artillery piece, the world’s largest airborne gun, and the 40-mm cannons poking out of its belly, but they were there. Radar pods and infrared cameras situated around the guns allowed the crew to shoot with pinpoint accuracy night or day. Jared and Mike stood nearby, and I heard Mike get on the radio and start painting the picture. He described our position and tried to focus the gun crew onto several of the convoys and Taliban positions.

“Roger, Talon 30, Reaper 21,” a silky female voice answered back.

Jared nudged me in the ribs. Reaper 21 had one of the sexiest voices I’ve ever heard. She sounded like Shania Twain to me, and for the rest of the night my mind saw the attractive country star behind the controls, although the way we smelled and looked, I doubted she’d be remotely interested. I turned toward Mike and saw Dave, Brian, Smitty, Bill, and Riley all gathered around the truck.

“Ooh, yeah,” someone said.

I wished we could let the Taliban know that their ass whipping was coming from an attractive American woman pilot.

When the Taliban heard the engines, the airwaves exploded with commands.

“The death plane,” one Taliban commander said in a raspy voice. They started ordering their fighters to get to their attack positions
and hide. The commanders seemed eager to attack and continued to bark orders to their troops for several minutes.

“Put down the watermelons,” the raspy commander said, using their code word for mines.

Reaper 21 saw a group of several trucks move toward the river and banked the AC-130 toward them. When she got there, only a compound was visible—no movement. The raspy Taliban commander had also stopped transmitting.

Nothing.

Mike had Reaper 21 fly away for a few minutes, hoping to trick the Talibs into an attack. The buzz of the props faded, leaving nothing but silence and tension. We waited patiently.

Still nothing.

When Reaper 21 returned, Mike worked her up and down the irrigation ditches looking for groups of fighters.

Nothing.

“It must be hard to get good help these days,” I said to Jared. We both had a good laugh.

Finally, Reaper 21 radioed back and said the gunners saw a group of eight men moving through the thick brush on the south side of our position. Mike ordered the bird to watch them closely. If they saw a weapon, shoot.

I could visualize the gunners in the cramped plane huddled over their black-and-white screens, searching for a weapon. No luck, but just because they couldn’t see the weapons, it didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

Not far away, we spotted two trucks just off the road. The Spectre picked up two heat signatures, but those men scrambled onto the trucks and took off. Still no visible weapons and the truck didn’t pose a threat. Radio calls weren’t enough to sanction an attack.

I wanted to fire. I’ve seen the Taliban hide behind women and children, and it made it easy to despise them. Their ideology does
not value their own people, except as sacrifices for their cause. It is sickening and inhumane. Every day I saw my soldiers and others accept enormous risk to prevent civilian causalities, even to the point of letting our enemies escape.

As the vehicles sped off, Mike focused the Spectre north of our position along the riverbed. Again, another group of about ten Taliban were trudging away. This group was moving much slower. David fired a white star cluster in their direction, and they took off in a dead sprint.

For the next several hours, we waited for an attack that never came. We’d won without firing a shot, but watching the Taliban operate told us they could coordinate a large attack with multiple groups of fighters, something that I’d never witnessed before in my three rotations to Afghanistan.

Finally, Reaper 21 flew on to other targets. Mike said good-bye for all of us. We all hated to hear her go. Her soothing female voice was a connection to what we all held dear. Even though we were far, far away from any ground support, we still had the full might of the United States of America at the end of our radio.

After chasing ghosts all night, I’d finally dozed off around five a.m. I woke to the swish of Dave cleaning the dust and grime from the .50-caliber machine gun with a stiff brush. It had been another night in my seat next to the driver, handsets lying on my chest and the weight of my vest slowly crushing my sternum. I cracked my eyes open and stared at the laminated pictures of Rachel Hunter and Dana Delany taped over my seat.

It was eight a.m. and my guys had let me sleep two extra hours, a treat not lost on me. The day was already hot and on its way into triple digits. The Afghans had put tarps up to shade their positions, which seemed unnecessary since we didn’t plan on staying. Bill was standing near his truck, and I asked him why the Afghans were dug in.

“Bill, what’s with the tarps? When are we taking off?”

“Ask the major,” he said, clearly not wanting to get in the middle.

Over at their truck, Jared and Mike had the scope out, scanning the maze of villages in the valley. Jared had a
shemagh
headdress, the traditional scarf of the Afghans, wrapped around his head and his uniform pants on. Like the rest of us, he preferred to shed some clothing rather than invite more misery.

“What did you find today for me to visit?” I asked Jared.

“Nothing. Nothing is moving,” he said.

Considering last night’s aborted attack, there must be something of interest out there. I took my turn at the scope; no movement in any direction. Not a donkey cart or Hilux truck on the road. No farmers tending the lush green fields that surrounded the mud compounds.

I called Victor and the other interpreters, who had been dozing in the hot sun, over to Jared’s truck. “What are you hearing?” I asked them.

“We hear nothing,
Turan
, everything is quiet.”

ISAF was running behind schedule, and Jared had decided to stay another night. We could literally be in our blocking position in a hard day’s ride. The Army had trained me to do a lot, but the best thing was to teach me to appreciate the simple things: water, clean clothes, and comfortable shoes. Today was a good day, and I bowed my head to give my gratitude.

Bill walked the perimeter to make sure the Afghans knew we planned to leave around five the next morning. We had an elaborate exit plan, and it required everybody’s attention. The Taliban knew our location, but we didn’t want them to follow us to our blocking position.

Before dawn the next day, on cue, every driver started his truck in concert with the others, generating one undifferentiated roar that
made it harder to count the total number of vehicles. The Afghan soldiers hunkered down under blankets in the truck beds. Special Forces soldiers drove using night vision. We crept slowly down the hill and into the riverbed. No one spoke either in the trucks or on the radio.